Friday, August 25, 2006
Verizon, D-Link and FiOS… Oh My!
Today I put a network card in my old Pentium 200 so I could transfer files easily, and in a pinch use it for internet if my main computer is ever down. Annoying with all the reboots and such, but straightforward enough.
In the process, I noticed a computer named “melissa01” using our network. Not at the time, but routinely since at least August 16th.
It’s probably the new upstairs neighbor, taking advantage of open wireless. That Verizon promised me would not be accessible by others in or around my building. They want you to use the D-Link router they provide, and it happens to have both wired and wireless capability. Yay.
This disturbed me enough to go digging into how to secure things. To me, there should be an off switch on the router so wireless can be physically, completely disabled if you do not use it. No such luck. Nor is there an easy, logical, straightforward answer to how to disable the wireless. You can’t; you can only make it harder for people to find and use.
I had not logged onto the router before. I’d thought the installation guy had set the login to something other than the default, and while I didn’t know offhand precisely what the default was, I had a good idea. After a few permutations it let me in, no problem.
At no time did I change the login or password while poking around in the router.
Based on what I learned, I turned off ID broadcasting by the router, which alone would have probably saved us having the neighbor tagging along. That lets people sniff out that you exist.
Subsequently I decided to turn of DHCP and assign us fixed IP addresses. That was how I ran things under DSL, using the DSL modem combined with a Linksys hub. I’d meant to change to that once we were functional on FiOS, but never got around to it. That’s another barrier to casual use of the wireless by just anyone.
That earned me no internet access at all. Figured that was either an artifact of DHCP not having been turned off yet on the router, or my needing to specify DNS on each computer.
Went to log onto the router to change DHCP and… nothing.
Absolutely no combination of default or logical login and password will let me open the router configuration. Apparently it went all rogue and reset itself to God knows what. Hey, not the first time I’ve seen the seemingly impossible happen like that.
Set the computer back to use DHCP so I can get online, but all I can figure is now I am going to have to set the router back to factory defaults with the little “in case of emergency” button and then won’t be able to get back online without calling Verizon to tell me what are the relevant settings.
Argh!
And if this is the upstairs people, what a way to make a positive first impression on me.